Pie Crust

You can’t make good pie without a great crust. Here it is.

I use a combination of European-style butter and lard in my pie crust. I know, some people find the idea of lard a little icky, but that’s a misunderstanding. Lard contains monounsaturated fat, and is actually healthier than the Crisco shortening my grandmother used, with all of its partially-hydrogenated soybean oil.

You can go with all butter if you must, but lard will give the crust a flaky lightness you just can’t get with an all-butter crust. Leaf lard is the highest grade of lard, but it’s pricey. This one is a decent alternative. Just make sure you choose a non-hydrogenated lard for baking.

But speaking of my grandmother, here’s a an old-fashioned measuring technique I learned from her. She never had a kitchen scale. She taught me how to measure a fat (like lard or coconut oil) that’s solid at room temperature but doesn’t come in measured sticks like butter, by dropping it into a cup of water and measuring how much volume it displaces. To measure ½ cup of lard, fill a 1-cup liquid measure to the ½-cup mark with cool water, then spoon in small amounts of lard, pushing it down to submerge it, until the water level rises to 1 cup. Pour off the water and you have exactly ½ cup of lard without the messy job of scraping it out of a measuring cup.

I think the hardest thing about making pie crust is knowing how much water to add to the dough. How much water a pie crust wants you to add depends on the amount of moisture in other ingredients (like the butter), and on how well the fat is incorporated into the flour before you start adding the water.

Making a transcendent pie crust is a learned skill but the good news is that while you’re working on perfecting your pie crust technique, you’re going to get to eat pie. It’s all good!

A few tips for rolling out pastry:

• Start with cold but not rock-hard dough. If your dough has been chilling for more than a couple of hours, let it sit for a few minutes at room temperature before starting.
• Lightly but evenly flour the pastry board. Put a disk of dough in the center of the board, and lightly flour the dough.

• Start to flatten the disk with your rolling pin, by rolling back and forth over it. Rotate the dough 1/4 turn and repeat. Do this 2 or 3 times. The dough may start to form cracks around the edges; pinch these together to form a smooth edge. Doing this now prevents deeper crags from forming later.
• Now start rolling from the center of the dough away from you. After each outward roll, rotate the dough 1/4 turn. So you’re always rolling from the center out, and rotating after every roll. Lightly flour the board underneath the dough, or the top of the dough as needed so you never let the dough stick to the board or the rolling pin.
• Test the size of the circle by placing your pie plate in the center of it. You want the dough circle to extend out about 3 inches larger than the plate.

• To lift the dough into the pie plate (or over the filling for the top crust), fold it in half and gently lift it, draping it into the plate. Never pull or stretch the dough. Use a sharp knife or kitchen shears to trim any excess dough overhanging the edge, leaving 1 inch of extra dough.
• For a single crust pie, turn the extra inch of dough under to make a double-thick edge, and flute it or add another decorative touch as desired. For a double crust pie, tuck the edge of the top crust under the overhang of the bottom crust, and crimp or seal as desired.

Making it ahead:

• The dough can be made ahead and chilled or frozen until needed. Put the plastic-wrapped disks of dough into a zip-lock freezer bag and chill the dough for 1 or 2 days, or freeze it for up to several months. Thaw frozen dough overnight in the refrigerator. When you’re ready to use it (whether it’s been frozen or merely chilled for more than a few hours), remove the dough from the refrigerator and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes at room temperature to soften slightly before rolling it out.

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